Child Health and Development

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To reach their full potential, children need high-quality health care and services—especially in life’s early years. Health promotion, safety, disease prevention, and early identification and treatment during these earliest years lay the foundation for healthy development.

Mounting evidence that health during childhood sets the stage for adult health creates an important ethical, social, and economic imperative to ensure that all children are as healthy as they can be. Healthy children are more likely to become healthy adults. FPG's scientists study many aspects of child health and development—from prenatal health to infant brain development to stress management in adolescents.

Featured Publication

In a recently released supplement issue of the journal Pediatrics, a national group of scientists and practitioners, including FPG’s Associate Director for Research, Ronald Seifer, proposed to examine community, school, and health care practice factors as integral to pediatric care supporting the development of behavioral health, especially among the most marginalized families and beginning in the first years of life.

Featured FPG News Story

A recent study from FPG Faculty Fellow Karen Bluth investigated the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary outcomes of an online self-compassion intervention for adolescents who self-identified as transgender or gender expansive, with the goal of improving their mental health. The results suggest that self-compassion interventions can be incorporated into therapy programs to support and improve mental health for transgender adolescents.

Featured Publication

Research shows that children's early social competence predicts their later academic and interpersonal success. Accordingly, early childhood education programs increasingly aim to evaluate and support children's social skill development. FPG’s Cathi Propper, PhD, contributed to a study that examined parasympathetic nervous system regulation in the classroom and its relationship to children's socially competent behaviors during structured activities.

Current Projects

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A Mechanistic Study of the Association Between Poverty and Executive Functions in Early Childhood: Contributions of Early Brain Development and the Early Caregiving Environment
The current study examines the link between poverty and executive functions (cognitive processes that facilitate learning, self-monitoring, and decision making) which are known to undergo rapid developmental change during the first years of life.
African-Centered Racial Equity Justice Project: Embracing Culturally Responsive Practices to Improve Early Learning and Child Outcomes
This project will develop an African-centered, culturally responsive practice guide with specific strategies, exemplars, and materials with connected professional learning modules to guide effective implementation. The ultimate and long-term goal is to increase Black children’s social, cognitive, and emotional skills (e.g., racial identity, engagement, learning motivation, regulation), leading to strong academic and social competence and school success.
An Effectiveness Replication of Targeted Reading Instruction: Investigating Long-Term Student and Teacher Impacts
This replication study seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of Targeted Reading Instruction (TRI, formerly called Targeted Reading Intervention) in helping grade 1 struggling readers make substantial gains in reading during one school year. It extends prior TRI studies by conducting an independent external evaluation of the TRI, testing long-term impacts for struggling readers into grade 3, and examining teachers’ sustained impacts for three years.
Black Infant and Toddler Equity Project
Through collaboration with national, state and local coalitions and organizations, the Equity Research Action Coalition will identify, track and align strategies to strengthen the focus on protecting, promoting, and preserving the well being, health, wealth, access and experiences of Black families and their families through anti-racist and cultural wealth policy making framework and communication.
Bright Spots: Strengthening the Education-to-Career Continuum in North Carolina
This project will support a cohort of place-based, cross-sector educational collaboratives ("myFutureNC network") across the state to develop model programs that significantly increase the number of students successfully pursuing post-secondary education and entering the workforce. This pilot aligns with the state's goal of having 2 million individuals between the ages of 25 and 44 with a high-quality credential or postsecondary degree by 2030.
Bringing the Science of Reading Home
TRI staff will create and present a series of five caregiver education workshops, which are designed to build knowledge and skills in the science of reading, in five locations across the Triangle.
Early Life Stress and the Environmental Origins of Disease: A Population-Based Prospective Longitudinal Study of Children in Rural Poverty (ECHO)
This project leverages and builds upon an existing longitudinal cohort to propose hypotheses that investigate the ways in which early life stress alters well-specified developmental processes to adversely affect neurodevelopment in childhood and increase risk for obesity and other health outcomes. It extends our prior data collection both retrospectively and prospectively in order to amplify and enhance our focus on adverse exposures and health and behavior outcomes.
Embedding Mental Health Consultation Within Prenatal Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment and Violence Exposure
Through close collaboration with the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) and the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families (RI DCYF), we will capitalize on established infrastructure to innovate and enhance a statewide short-term home visiting program.
Equity Research Action Coalition
The Equity Research Action Coalition will co-construct with practitioners and policymakers actionable research to support the optimal development of Black children prenatally through childhood across the African diaspora using a cultural wealth framework. The coalition will focus on developing a science-based action framework to eradicate the impact of racism and poverty and all its consequences on the lives of Black children, families, and communities, and to ensure optimal health, well-being, school readiness and success, and overall excellence.
Equity-Focused Research-Action Coalition and Repository Development
The goal of this project is to support the development of an interdisciplinary, multi-organizational research action coalition to identify anti-racist, culturally-sustaining, and asset-focused factors that ensure that Black children, their families, and communities thrive. Specific to this project is the development of a national repository/clearinghouse that provides up to date information on actionable research, practice, and policy evidence about what matters and works for Black children.
Family Life Project
The purpose of this project is to understand the early development trajectories in both poor and non-poor young children growing up in rural areas characterized by high poverty. An interdisciplinary team of investigators has been following children from birth with measurement of child, family, and school functioning, observed mother and father sensitivity and language input in the home setting, observed quality of instruction in child care and elementary school, characteristics of the community, and biomarkers of child and maternal stress.
From the Womb to Cradle: How Racism Influences the Development of Infants and Preschoolers
The purpose of this collaboration with Boston University is to develop and disseminate various products focused on the effects of racism during infancy through early childhood (birth to age 5) for racially marginalized children and families, specifically those that are Black, Latine, Indigenous, or Asian.
Longitudinal Examination of DNA Methylation in Maltreated Children
We are examining psychiatric and health outcomes in a 5-year follow-up of 200 well-characterized, very high-risk, maltreated and non-maltreated children. This is an ideal study in which to examine patterns of stability and change in the regulation of stress-sensitive genes over time.
Observer Rating Scale of Preschool Children's Peer Social Competence
The purpose of this project is to establish the psychometric feature and instrument useability of a practitioner-administered observer impression scale assessment of preschool children’s peer-related social competence. The ratings for this scale are based on three 5-minute observations of preschool children engaging in social interaction with their peers. The information may be used for general assessment for all children, screening for children who may need support in establishing positive peer social competence, and progress monitoring. Phase 1 of this project will focus on content validity, cultural and ethnic appropriateness of items, and instrumentation that would allow for online data collection. Phase 2 of the project will involve large-scale data collection that will allow instrument modification, confirmatory factor analysis, and evaluation of useability. Phase 3 of the project will examine criterion-related validity, utility as a progress monitoring tool, interactions of child and rater demographic characteristics, and scalability. At the end of this project, a fully developed, psychometrically verified, and practical assessment of preschool children’s peer social competence, suitable for scaling up for program use, will be available to early childhood programs and practitioners.
Overcoming Structural Racism in Housing Stability and Wealth-building: Laying the Foundation for Community Health and Wellbeing
The aim of this research project is to investigate the relationships among housing stability, health and well-being, and climate change vulnerability. Findings will be shared with our community-both with people who experience homelessness and housing instability and with organizations and agencies working to serve those populations. The goal is that the research findings will advance racial and economic justice, not just in Orange and Durham Counties, but throughout the United States. As a nonprofit working toward systems change, these findings will influence the day-to-day programmatic work that CEF does and help to influence how CEF can use its person-centered approach while simultaneously steering members toward specific measures that increase stability.
Packaging and Disseminating the JOIN for ME Program in Low-Income Settings
The JOIN for ME program is a pediatric weight management intervention that can be delivered in community settings, with potential for national dissemination. We will package the JOIN for ME program to increase acceptability and feasibility for delivery in low-income communities and test implementation in two novel settings: the housing authority and the patient-centered medical home. The revised JOIN for ME package will be tested in a rigorous implementation study.
Program on Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Families
The Frank Porter Graham Program on Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Families is a suite of programs related to self-compassion in families and schools. Our mission is to bring specialized self-compassion training to teens, pre-teens, children, parents, educators, and all adults who traverse the lives of youth, with the ultimate goal of creating a community embued with greater compassion for ourselves and others.
Rhode Island Asthma Integrated Response Program (RI-AIR)
The RI-Asthma Integrated Response (RI-AIR) Asthma Care Implementation Program (ACIP) is a comprehensive system of identification, screening, and intervention for pediatric asthma. We aim to demonstrate that RI-AIR ACIP is a replicable, evidence-based, and cost-saving model that improves asthma outcomes for children at most risk, and can be disseminated to other urban communities to address asthma disparities.
The Development of Gut Microbiota and Behavioral Inhibition in Childhood: The Role of Early Stress and Brain Development
The current study will be the first to examine the influence of early toxic stress, including the distal effects of living in poverty as well as the proximal factors of negative parenting and household chaos, on the development of gut microbiome diversity and maturity across 15, 24, 26, and 54 months.
The Power of Language: Does the Quality of Preschool Teacher Language Translate Into Children's Executive Functions?
This project will use secondary data analysis of two longitudinal datasets to test if childcare provider language prospectively predicts child executive functions (EFs) directly or indirectly through child language. We will also examine if different ways of measuring preschool teacher language quality are differentially predictive of child language and subsequent EFs.

Publications and Other Resources

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Reliability and Validity of a Teacher Impressions Scale to Assess Social Play of Swedish Children in Inclusive Preschools
Published: July 2022 Type: Journal Articles
Individual Differences in Frontal Alpha Asymmetry Moderate the Relationship Between Acute Stress Responsivity and State and Trait Anxiety in Adolescents
Published: July 2022 Type: Journal Articles
The Brain and Early Experience Study: Protocol for a Prospective Observational Study
Published: June 2022 Type: Journal Articles
The Family is the Patient: Promoting Early Childhood Mental Health in Pediatric Care
Published: May 2022 Type: Journal Articles
Coordination of Autonomic and Endocrine Stress Responses to the Trier Social Stress Test in Adolescence
Published: March 2022 Type: Journal Articles

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